Keep shaking

Some years ago I was at a dharma talk—a Buddhist “sermon” of sorts—given by Julia Butterfly Hill. Julia is an activist who lived for just over two years in a thousand-year-old redwood tree in Humboldt County, CA, ultimately saving it and the trees around it from being clear cut.

As relatable and stunning as her words were, I don’t recall them precisely. What I do remember vividly, though, is the shaking voice and body through which she delivered the first few minutes of that brilliance.

And she named it up front: every time she’s about to give a talk of any kind, she shakes. This wildly courageous human who—in case you thought you didn’t read that correctly the first time—resided in high the branches of a redwood for two years and saved the acres of ancient life from being massacred by the logging industry, trembled every single time she spoke in front of a group, even a few dozen humble meditators.

She explained it this way: the words weren’t coming from her. It was something bigger coming through her. She wasn’t shaking with nerves, or with ego, or with worry that the talk wouldn’t go well. It was the fact that a dispatch from the world’s very soul was making its way into the world via the channel of her voice. So yeah, her body—despite all she knew and trusted about the workings of life and spirit—got a little overwhelmed by this.

What Julia didn’t do was stand backstage (off-altar?) with her hands on her knees, taking deep breaths to “compose” herself before coming out and sitting confidently before her audience. She spent half an hour meditating with the group, opening to whatever the message was, and then, when it was time, let the energy of it move her right there in front of us.

This, of course, is a departure from what we’re used to, which is probably why I never forgot it. When have you listened to a keynote address, a lecture in a class or training, a goddamned TED talk, where the ‘expert’ at the front of the room was shaky or tentative? Despite the lip service we’re paying to vulnerability these days, there’s still very little room for physical expressions of it. This, like so many of the misguided principles on which our world has been built, is precisely counter to our nature.

Because science

Shaking is indeed a sign that something is overwhelming us a little bit (or a lot). It’s actually a healthy, necessary, evolutionarily intelligent way of discharging that overwhelm so it doesn’t consume us.

In case you’re someone who will only believe something if science has proven it, here you go: this is scientifically proven. In his book Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, Dr. Peter Levine shows that the very natural response of trembling after something scary happens, when allowed to complete itself, dispels trauma and anxiety from the body. Animals do this all the time. But we darling humans, allergic as we are to expressions of ‘weakness’ (fear, anxiety, rage, and all those other ‘negative’ emotions aren’t allowed to feel, let alone express) usually cut that process short, so the trauma keeps cycling through our bodies.

The therapeutic modality TRE – Trauma Release Exercise – incites the body to shake on its own to release trauma, anxiety, or even to simply bring deeper relaxation. In other words, healing comes through shaking on purpose.

Cut-off expression

Shaking doesn’t have to be associated with capital-T trauma. Writing or sharing in front of a group is relatively mild as these things go—though it isn’t not traumatic. Maybe we don’t carry the injuries on our bodies or even in our hearts, but I daresay the trauma of interrupted expression lives in all of us in some way. At some point, our soul was cut off in its attempt to make itself known in the world because didn’t look the way it’s “supposed” to according to whoever was in charge. It was messy or impolite. Its colors didn’t match the décor. It was loud, off-key, made someone uncomfortable. Our authenticity was tossed like so many fish guts into the bucket with all the other unwelcome stuff.

Ouch.

Shaking seems to be one path to claiming (or reclaiming) what is ours to say, to be. Whatever we are trying to express is big, scary, and possibly uninvited. I mean, do you think everyone believed ol’ Julia when she was trying to say what she knew, and when she took the extreme step of acting on that knowing? And even if she had the most supportive community in the world, even if every step she took was met with a green light, the enormity of what she is up to, the messages she has to deliver, are simply too big for one tiny human body to hold all at once. Like her beloved redwoods that swayed, sometimes violently, when a strong wind moved through them, she let herself be rocked by the significant words blowing through her. Anything less would have resulted in an incomplete message, a truncated expression.

What you have to say is also that important. Yup, it is. Can you let your full self be literally moved by the significance of it—by the significance of what you are doing by sharing it?

If we can stay with it …

At an in-person workshop recently I got to witness this shaking phenomenon close-up.  Two first timers sat tentatively in the circle. They hadn’t written much in their lives, but had a longing to begin. Before they read their pieces, they held out their hands to show us. When it was time to write they made marks on the page with those shaky paws. And then they read what they wrote.

When Sam read, I believe my first words were something like, “I don’t think we’ve ever had a group snot quite like this.” Meaning most of us were openly weeping at the resonant beauty of what he wrote. And later when I said, “I don’t know if you know this, bud, but you’re a writer,” we were astonished at his response that he believed himself to be a terrible one. He appeared to take in our slack-jawed disbelief of this statement. He was still shaking, but he was also breathing. He was laughing. He was at ease. Later, he confessed he’d begun writing a book a few years back and intended to revisit it. Well holy cow.

Gary, too, held out his quaking hand and, in a quiet voice, read a piece that was as jaw-droppingly stunning. We learned he is a painter, which made sense since his style, clearly, was painting with words. He shared—shakily!—that he dreamed of writing and illustrating children’s books. After hearing just one piece we could see that so, so clearly, and we told him so. We believe he will do just that.

If either of these marvelously creative souls took their trembling as a signal that they should back away from this terrifying thing, the world would have been deprived of their expression. They would have been robbed of the joy (and frustration, and wonder, and sheer aliveness) of delivering it.

Keep shaking

Writing and sharing the truth—trusting what is coming through us—is a massive act. Even if we’re in a circle of kind people who we know won’t judge us, the sheer size of what we’re doing might overwhelm us a little bit, or a lot. Can we let that be? Can we let our voices tremble, stay with the shaking long enough to see what is on the other side of it?